Chunghwa Telecom Laboratories and NTT begin joint experiment on open optical networking for datacenter interconnect application

Date: 2017/10/31

In September of 2017, Chunghwa Telecom Laboratories (“CHT-TL”: Head Office: Yangmei District, Taoyuan City, Taiwan; President: Shyang-Yih Chen) and Nippon Telegraph and Telecom Corporation (“NTT”: Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan; President and Chief Executive Officer: Hiroo Unoura) commenced joint experiment for the purpose of applying open source software (OSS) and whitebox switch^[1] to Datacenter Interconnect (DCI) optical network.

Driven by expansion of cloud services, tighter integration between IT/OT and growing importance of IT service continuity, optical transmission network between data centers is becoming increasingly important in corporate IT infrastructure. CHT-TL has been actively studying the application of SDN^[2] technology to optical transmission network while utilizing OSS for cost reduction of optical transmission network and advanced network services. Meanwhile NTT has expertise on network software technology and OSS development capability obtained through the development of Ryu^[3] or GoBGP^[4] which were both open sourced and OSS project such as OpenStack.

This experiment aims for the application of OSS and whitebox switch to realize more bandwidth, capacity and intelligence for inter-datacenter optical network by sharing CHT-TL’s operational expertise accumulated over many years as the largest telecommunications carrier in Taiwan and NTT’s expertise in OSS development and open commoditized hardware.

Utilizing OSS and open commoditized hardware technology is becoming a matured method to construct intra-datacenter network where large datacenter operators introduce these technologies to automate configuration and operation of the network. Based on this technology trend, NTT and CHT-TL decided to carry out demonstration experiment to verify whether inter-datacenter optical network can also assimilate these open technologies.

Both companies will continue to collaborate on technological development in the field of optical transmission network between data centers.

[1] Whitebox switch : Also known as bare metal switch. Network Hardware without vendor’s closed software.

[2] SDN : software-defined networking

[3] Ryu : Open Source SDN Framework http://osrg.github.io/ryu/

[4] GoBGP : Open Source BGP implementation http://osrg.github.io/gobgp/